Reader to writer…a long road. with bonus giveaway!

So, I promised a giveaway today and I’ll get to that, but first I have to ramble a bit.

A lot of people who talk to writers want to ask the same questions. Where do you get your ideas? What’s the hardest part about writing? And of course, how did you get to be a writer?

That’s a good question actually. Not sure my answer makes any sense but here it goes.

As I’ve stated on here before, I was a reader long before I was a writer. I read books like a starving person attacks a free buffet. I love books. They’ve taken me to more places than I will ever get to in real life. I will probably never leave North America, but in my head I’ve already travelled the world.

Some friends and I were talking about the reasons we read the kind of stories we do and for me it’s all about an escape. I love getting lost in a story and being transported to another world. The places I visit aren’t always good and sometimes they’re downright scary but it’s all a part of the adventure.

I didn’t always want to be a writer. I was happy to read, and in fact when I was younger I would have considered writing as one of those things that got in the way of more reading time.

I’d go through bouts of reading romance novels, the trashier the better, and then move on to something historical. I’d read Beatrice Small and then steal my dad’s Bernard Cornwell book. I’d read Clive Cussler and fall in love with Louisa May Alcott.

I adore Dean Koontz and I fell in love with Stephen King twice in my life. The first time when in my early teens, when it was all about having the crap scared out of me. The second time was in my mid-twenties when I discovered that so many of his books were connected to each other. I went back and re-read ever story in a matter of months, looking for those connections and it added a new element of excitement for me.

As a teen, I wrote poetry, but never with any kind of concentration or intent. In my early twenties I started to get the urge to try getting some of the thoughts in my head down on paper. It never went anywhere though. I couldn’t seem to organize all the ideas running through my brain into anything with any sort of order.

It wasn’t until I was forty that I found a way to finally put words into sentences and have them make sense. It started out of pure frustration with a show I loved. The characters were amazing but the writing sucked and all I could think about what “I could do better than that.”

All my first stories are short little missing moments from the show or alternate scenes describing how I thought it should go.

But then I started getting ideas about completely different directions my characters could go and I started putting those down as well.

My first novella, Cowboy Way, was only supposed to be a few chapters and somehow ended up being 26. Once I got started, I found that the characters started to take themselves to new places and I was sort of just along for the ride.

So the “writer” part of my life was born, but I’m still a reader. My reading material is a little different now. Mary Calmes and C. Cardeno top my list of favorite authors, but of course, anything can (and usually does) catch my attention. I can find myself half way through a novel when all I intended was a quick look at the first couple of pages. Doesn’t take much and I’m completely gone for hours.

I hope there’s someone out there who feels the same way about my stories.

So, speaking of my stories, here’s the promised giveaway. Take a look at my stories on Dreamspinner and then comment below with the one you’d like to win. I’ll choose the winner Saturday morning.

Here is the link to my stories at Dreamspinner Press. http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/store/index.php?cPath=55_454